Professor Graham Reed

Deputy Director

Graham Reed, FREng, BSc, PhD, FIET, CEng, is Professor of Silicon Photonics and Group Leader. He has recently joined Southampton from the University of Surrey, where he was Professor of Optoelectronics, and was Head of the Department of Electronic Engineering from 2006 to 2012. Reed is a pioneer in the field of Silicon Photonics, and acknowledged as the individual who initiated the research field in the UK. He established the Silicon Photonics Research Group at Surrey in 1989.

The first Silicon Photonics company in the world, Bookham Technology Inc., was founded by Reed’s PhD student, Dr Andrew Rickman, and adopted the research developed in the Group. The Silicon Photonics Group have provided a series of world leading results since it’s inception, and are particularly well known for their work on silicon optical modulators. For example, the Group produced the first published design of an optical modulator with a bandwidth exceeding 1 GHz, and were the first to publish the design of a depletion mode optical modulator, which is now a technology standard device.

More recently the team were responsible for the first all-silicon optical modulator operating at 40Gb/s with a high extinction ratio (10dB), as well as a second modulator design (also operating at 40Gb/s) that operates close to polarization independence. They have now reported the first device operating at 50 Gb/s. Reed is a regular invited and contributing author to the major Silicon Photonics conferences around the world. He has served on numerous international conference committees, and has also chaired many others.

To name but two, he has been co-chair, of the Silicon Photonics symposium at Photonics West since it was first established in 2006, and in 2011 he was co-chair of the prestigious Silicon Photonics conference, IEEE Group IV Photonics, held at the Royal Society in London. He is currently a member of 5 international conference committees, and has published over 250 papers in the field of Silicon Photonics. He will co-chair 4 international symposia/conferences in 2012.